The Torch Will Need Its Passport Today
It’s off into Wales today and the weather appears to be holding. If it’s going to rain, it’ll surely be in Wales or Manchester.
Crowds in Worcester look to be good, even at eight in the morning. How many cafes and tea-shops have have record takings?
Perhaps, it shows that the best way to get through a recession, is to have a party?
I know that people have subscribed to this blog from all over the world. So who is the furthest away, who’s watch the Olympic Torch Relay. Click here to watch.
It’s getting addictive, as this tweet posted on the BBC web site shows.
Sorry the BBC can’t take the blame for everything, although Andrew Cowie may disagree as he tweets: “I think the #bbctorchcam will over take Facebook as the reason i failed my exams!”
Could Auntie have come up with the ultimate Internet time-waster?
BBC Creates Addictive Viewing
According to the BBC, the amount of viewers of the Olympic Torch Relay has exceeded all expectations. You could argue, that they would say that wouldn’t they. In fact Roger Mosey says it all here.
The coverage is not by satellite, but by mobile phone 3G technology, which gives the odd break in transmission.
Some are saying it’s addictive on Twitter and Facebook. He’s one from Scotland.
Frances Chisholm on Facebook says: ”Kind of addictive” is an understatement. I am enjoying it all so much. Almost late for work this morning! I’m an ordinary working British Citizen, but “torchcam” makes me feel I can be part of it (the olympics) keep up the wonderful work! Will be cheering the flame when it passes through SELKIRK, Scottish Borders.
And I thought the Scots weren’t in favour of the Games.
FaceBook Renames Itself
To celebrate the performance of its shares, Facebook has changed its name to Facebomb.
As I left the site some time ago and wouldn’t deal in the shares at all, I can’t say this all bothers me. To paraphrase Marx, it’s a club I wouldn’t join, just because they’d have me as a member.
Bad Maths
I’m 65 this year. Could my generation’s everyday maths, be better, as we had to cope with £sd? When I served in a bar in the 1960s, you learned things like 3 bottles of Guinness at 1s. 8d. were 5s. You had to do it all mentally, as the till was just a drawer.
I also played a lot of cribbage and other card games. Many of which need a certain amount of arithmetical dexterity. So have computer games lost all this?
But in some ways my biggest advantage was that my mother had very good arithmetical skills, partly brought on as she had been a comptometer operator before and during the Second World War, at Reeves just down the road from where I now live. So when we travelled in the car, she would always set me puzzles.
Interestingly, comptometer is rejected by the computerised spelling on this computer and WordPress.
Getting Fed Up With Spurious Likes
I’m getting rather fed up with people saying they like pages in my blog because they’re hoping that will get more traffic to their blog, which in many cases, I am not interested in.
It never used to happen, but now if I publish a small page, it will get several likes immediately.
If people like a page, they should say so in a comment.
Where Is Notepad in Windows 7?
Notepad is one of those little programs in Windows that I’ve always used.
Until Windows 7, it was always easy to find under Accessories, but now such a boring but useful program has to be searched for.
The thing I use it for most is to strip control characters out of a string, I’ve captured from say a web page. I also use it, when I’ve filled in a form to hold and store, what I’ve typed in.
It is a very useful program, that has more used than a Swiss Army knife.
Religious Spam
I just received some rather evangelical religious spam. It’s funny but it is actually quite unusual to get spam like this, although I do get a fair bit through the letter box and see it stuck to the bus stop. But then that tends to be a bit phobic in various ways.
This message was just too long to read, so I deleted it.
I did have brief look at it and sees that it mentions someone called Linda Newkirk from Arkansas. Searching for her on the Internet reveals the sort of things, that give Christianity a bad name in the minds of the well-read believer. But then people like this have always been around to burn Catholics or Protestants at the stake, persecute the Jews, Huguenots, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Sikhs, to name a small selection of those persecuted over the centuries. And I suspect the Homo Sapiens used to persecute the Neandertals before that!
If this mad woman had any faith, she’d be against capital punishment and would proclaim the fact, as it is still legal in Arkansas.
To me anybody, who believes in capital punishment and religion is a complete hypocrite.
The Camerons Get a Real Aussie Nanny
According to this report in the Standard, the Camerons have got a new nanny and she’s a real Aussie.
Interestingly for her employers, she admitted to shoplifting, smoking and drinking, but denied taking drugs “in the past month”. When asked if she swears, she replied: “f*** yeah.”
At least there’s no mention of sheep.
In some ways the most interesting part of the story is that the Camerons interviewed the nanny on Skype. I wonder how many of our Prime Ministers and/or their partners could have done that?
Boris Does It First
I wanted to send a message to Boris Johnson’s campaign for the Mayor of London. I actually sent a similar message to other candidates, so don’t imply any favouritism here.
But Boris had a new type of real-person checker or captcha, I’ve not seen before. Instead of asking to type in two obscured words, which sometimes I find difficult because of my eyesight, it asked me to do a simple sum.
So congratulations to Boris’s web site designer for being the first I’ve seen using it. It may be a lot commoner than I think. But so-what, it was the first I saw. On one web site, where I was trying to buy something the captcha was so difficult, I went elsewhere.
Are Blackberries the Cause of the World’s Ills?
I have said that to me, as a very experienced keyboard user, that the Blackberry is a piece of very bad design.
But it is loved by the great and good in politics and business, from Barack Obama downwards.
So if they choose such an obscure device can we trust them to make the proper decisions, that affect us all?
The Anonymous Widower 